They are at the end of their tether, exhausted by two years of confinement, school to do at home, loneliness, isolation, invisibility… And they meet to shout together and evacuate the stress.
All have children, a distant or non-existent partner, a job, errands to manage, cleaning, cooking, washing up, homework for the youngest, so many tasks multiplied by the pandemic. And that’s what prompted Boston resident Sarah Harmon to launch the first collective shouting session ten months ago.
Sarah Harmon is both a mother of two little girls and a psychotherapist. For two years, she has been juggling the constraints linked to the fight against the Covid, but above all she has realized that she was not the only mother at her wit’s end.
Last March, she therefore decided to propose to those who wish to meet to shout together, and evacuate tensions. To respect the barrier gestures, the meeting is fixed in the open air, on a football field, in the evening, after the children have gone to bed. Twelve mothers answer the call, and, in the cold and the night, post themselves two meters away from each other, inhale and cry out. A cry from the guts, grouped, repeated a dozen times, and followed by a silence of relief.
The session is soothing, so the group decides to meet regularly. Until last week, when the Facebook page created by Sarah Harmon was spotted, attracting D-Day journalists from the Boston Globe and NPR radio. The next day, the scene is broadcast, immediately inspiring other initiatives, from other women, in other cities, from Anchorage in Alaska to New Orleans in Louisiana.
For an exhausted group of mothers in Boston, the pandemic had been so draining that they just wanted to scream. So they did. https://t.co/6oaO3EGjKG pic.twitter.com/Z5DIoULSJg
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 24, 2022
“This initiative speaks to many people because many people do not feel heard or even seen.summarizes Sarah Harmon to the MSNBC channel, what the cry proposes is to normalize a taboo emotion. We don’t have the right to be angry, or to feel frustrated, however, it happens then in these cases, we internalize, and we end up suffering from it. But anger is healthy, at least it is when you channel it.”
Of course, shouting does not solve the problem, but the operation has the merit of making it visible, audible, of challenging the whole of society and of creating in places what can greatly help: solidarity.